The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Now, it seemed, no one was in charge. The people in Tokyo, their illusions of total victory completely shattered, were frozen. In a way, it was as if the crisis existed within MacArthur himself: he had always wanted those around him to see him as omniscient; now that he had been defeated on the battlefield by an Asian army and peasant generals, it was as if he had lost faith not just in his own forces but in himself. He had spoken before the Chinese entry into the war of achieving the greatest victory in the history of Christendom, of rivers running red with Chinese blood. Now he spoke in hardly less apocalyptic terms of either widening the war (and using the atomic bomb) or abandoning the Korean peninsula altogether. The last thing he was prepared to do was admit the mistakes he had made, and then try to piece his broken army back together. He was a man who liked to talk about the Asian concept of losing face; now he himself, good Caucasian though he was, had lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all before himself. Later, both Omar Bradley and Matt Ridgway talked of this as a period where his mood swings, always considered a problem by other commanders and senior civilians, were more pronounced than ever.

  To no one’s surprise MacArthur did not take responsibility for the defeat; if anything he soon spoke as if he had been the principal victim of Washington’s policies. Even worse, as a commander he could not bring himself to visit his men or the country where the defeat had taken place, as if to go there would mean having to face those who knew how badly he had failed. He stayed in the protective lee of the Dai Ichi, among his staff, not visiting Korea until December 11, two weeks after the Chinese strike. Some of his cables back to Washington in those days smacked of the purest fantasy: he claimed that Tenth Corps, in great jeopardy on the east coast when the Chinese had come in, was not, as everyone in Washington knew, fighting for its very life, but still on an offensive mission and had tied down six to eight Chinese divisions that might otherwise have been hammering the Eighth Army. “When messages like that came in,” Ridgway later said, “it was as if the madness were in the room.”

  There had been a moment just before the Chinese struck when, as his biographer William Manchester wrote, MacArthur had been “a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him.” And then after the worst had happened, “he could not bear to end his career in checkmate.” Suddenly, he looked to outsiders, even those who bore him some measure of goodwill, like an old man hopelessly out of touch. The British general Leslie Mansergh, who visited him in Tokyo then, observed that “he appeared to be much older than his seventy years. Signs of nerves and strain were apparent.” He seemed to Mansergh completely disconnected from the battlefield reality: “When he emphasized the combined efforts and successes of all front-line troops in standing shoulder to shoulder, and dying if necessary in their fight against communism, it occurred to me that he could not have been fully in the picture. I cannot believe he would have made these comments in such a way if he had been in full possession of the facts which I would inevitably learn later, facts that some Americans had been less than staunch. It occurred to me then, and was emphasized later, that the war in Korea is reproduced in Tokyo with certain omissions of the more unpalatable facts.”

  He became, Clayton James, his generally sympathetic biographer, wrote, “depressed and short tempered at GHQ and often spent the nights suffering insomnia and pacing back and forth along the hallway at his home. His moods would swing to extremes—from buoyant optimism about winning the war before Christmas 1950, to alarmist predictions a little later that his troops would be forced to withdraw to Japan unless mightily reinforced.” No one around him, James noted of that period, could bring certain subjects up with him, such as his dubious choice of Ned Almond as a corps commander or his decision to split his forces. He was irritable when the press made fun of him for relabeling what had once been a grandiose all-out boys-home-before-Christmas offensive as “a reconnaissance in force,” successful, in his words, because it prematurely triggered the Chinese attack.

  The mood swings had always been a problem, as the people dealing with him in Washington were very much aware. Omar Bradley wrote of “his brilliant but brittle” mind snapping in this period when he realized that his civilian superiors in Washington were not going to permit an all-out war with China, a larger war in which he would be able to reclaim victory and thus redeem himself. Matt Ridgway described him to one writer as a man capable of being brilliant and completely lucid at one moment and the next minute, during the very same conversation—as if he had suddenly thrown a switch—soaring off into a private world that only he understood (and inhabited), where defeats were not defeats and the victories of his adversaries not really victories. When he described MacArthur’s behavior in the weeks after the Chinese entered the war, Dean Acheson would quote Euripides: “Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.”

  In the days after the Chinese attack and as the extent of the defeat became clear, it often seemed surreal for those reporters dealing with the command, the contrast between reality in Korea and in Tokyo. Joe Fromm, the U.S. News reporter who had been on Charles Willoughby’s enemies list, long remembered one particular scene in that stretch. About a week after the defeat at Kunuri, there was a press briefing in Tokyo at which Willoughby presided. There he was, the chief of intelligence, at the lectern, as full of certitudes as ever, seemingly unshaken by defeat, and trying to prove that he and his people in G-2 had been right about the Chinese all along, had, in fact, been tracking them from the time they left the south of China and had known exactly what they were planning to do. Indeed, even when MacArthur had made his famous home-by-Christmas pledges, he had known that a great many Chinese had already crossed the Yalu and that there were troops from at least thirty divisions on both sides of the border in easy striking distance of American forces. Well, if that were true, one reporter asked, why had he gone ahead with his major offensive, knowing he was outnumbered three to one? “We couldn’t just passively sit by,” Willoughby answered. “We had to attack and find out the enemy’s profile.” The command, it turned out, had not been surprised at all. “I went back to my office,” Fromm said years later, “and I thought to myself, Now they say that they always knew, because they’re never wrong, and now they say they were never surprised because they can never be surprised, and yet if you checked with the kids who fought there, someone fucked up, because the kids who fought there didn’t know about all the Chinese the way MacArthur and Willoughby knew about them. It’s madness. Pure madness. Someone is crazy.”

  Gradually a new line began to emerge from Tokyo. To the degree that things had gone wrong, it was because Washington had hamstrung MacArthur, preventing him from attacking Chinese bases on the other side of the Yalu. He had not waited very long to launch his own defense in friendly journals and with friendly editors. On December 1, ten days before he could bring himself to visit his men in the field, a long article appeared in U.S. News in which he attacked the administration for not letting him go in “hot pursuit” of the Chinese by bombing their Manchurian bases. That, he said, placed on him “an enormous [military] handicap, without precedent in history.” In Washington it was viewed as another Posterity Paper. Truman was predictably furious. On December 6, he imposed a gag rule on all parties, demanding that any policy statements on Korea by anyone be cleared with State. Of all the rules put in place at this time, it was the one MacArthur paid the least attention to.

  Later Bradley ruminated that this was another critical moment when the Joint Chiefs badly failed the president. Washington had been impotent, forced to listen to bad news without being able to do anything to change the nature of the battlefield. To Bradley it seemed that “MacArthur was throwing in the towel without the slightest effort to put up a fight.” In Washington, they knew that the Chinese had broken off contact after Walker retreated south of Pyongyang, and showed no taste for pursuit. “Why then,” Bradley wondered, “was the Eighth Army running to the rear so hard and fast? Wh
y hadn’t MacArthur gone to Korea to steady Walker and rally the troops with his famous rhetoric? It was disgraceful.” It was a defeated Army. Walker probably should have been relieved right then and there; his position had been untenable for too long. A new man was obviously needed on the battlefield, either Matthew Ridgway or Jim Van Fleet, another rising star who had done well in steadying anti-Communist forces in Greece. In addition, MacArthur should have been ordered to combine his two forces, Eighth Army and Tenth Corps. In the top echelon at this time, only Dean Rusk, Bradley noted, seemed to be pushing for such serious acts to break the mood of pessimism that had taken hold of the military. (Why, Rusk asked, couldn’t we “muster our best effort and spirit to put up our best fight?” The British, he said, had done that time and again early in World War II—why couldn’t we?)

  It was the bleakest time for the Truman administration. The war, which the president had thought was virtually over, had not only been enlarged, but the commanding general was now surfacing as the administration’s most serious adversary, as much a political as a military one, blaming the administration for a lack of support, and in effect for the defeat. The president himself, normally very much in control in press conferences, had slipped badly on November 30, as the Chinese offensive began. He answered a question about what the United States was going to do in Korea by saying they would do whatever was necessary to meet the challenge. “Will that include the atomic bomb?” another reporter asked. Truman could easily have ducked it, but he answered, “That includes every weapon we have.” Then another reporter asked, “Does that mean there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?” And Truman responded, “There has always been active consideration of its use.” Then he made things even worse by saying it was something the military people would have to decide and adding that the military commander in the field would be “in charge of the use of all these weapons.”

  That terrified a great many people—American citizens and allies alike—because it implied that MacArthur, the commander in the field, was in charge of whether or not to use atomic weapons. Slowly, awkwardly, the administration pulled back from the president’s words. The Joint Chiefs were especially weak in those months. Brave and otherwise independent men often became quite bureaucratic once they were members of the JCS. That reflected one of the great secrets of the military culture—how officers who had been so brave in battle, fearless when it mattered, could be so bland and cautious as they reached what was seemingly a career pinnacle. That had been true in Korea; it would be even truer in Vietnam. There were, it appeared, two very different kinds of courage in many military men—bravery in battle, and independence or bravery within the institution—and they did not often reside side by side.

  The Chiefs wanted MacArthur to consolidate his forces, to fold Tenth Corps back into the Eighth Army and create a unified command in which American troops would be protecting the flanks of the main force. They believed that the superior mobility of their own forces, when combined with the limited logistical ability of the Chinese, would allow the UN troops to pull back forty or fifty miles, regroup, and then present a much more formidable defensive line—backed by air and artillery—should the Chinese continue to advance. Except for the difficult talk of extricating the Marines from the area around the Chosin Reservoir, it was doable, they believed, because in most places the Chinese had broken off contact after their initial strike. As early as November 29, the Chiefs had cabled MacArthur suggesting just that. It was—and this was critically important—a suggestion, not an order. But he immediately turned it down, cabling them on December 3, “There is no practicality nor would any accrue thereby to unite the forces of Eighth Army and Tenth Corps.” The Joint Chiefs were stunned. They could not understand the military logic behind the cable, except that, implicitly, their suggestion might have been taken as an indictment of his earlier decision to split his forces. The cable was a reminder that even when the general was wrong, he was never wrong.

  His cables were now full of the most pessimistic of predictions. Unless he got vastly more troops, his forces would soon be forced to withdraw into beachhead bastions. The Chiefs were unnerved by the rising tone of pessimism—indeed panic—in these cables. Bradley later went through some of them, angrily writing comments in the margins, and added quite bitterly of that period that MacArthur had “treated us as if we were children.”

  THE ENTRANCE OF the Chinese and the terrible UN defeats in the North did not make America more cautionary. Rather it sharpened the existing political divide, made the China Firsters more hawkish, cast few doubts among the faithful about MacArthur’s decisions, and subjected the administration to even more pressure, sending Truman’s popularity spiraling still further downward. For those in the China Lobby it was absolute proof that American policy in Asia had failed; to Henry Luce it showed that he had been right on China all along as Acheson had been wrong. Now perhaps, Luce hoped, the administration would be more resolute in Asia. As one of Luce’s biographers, Robert Herzstein, wrote, Luce had always seen Korea not “as a police action, or a quagmire, but as one promising front in the war to liberate China.” Now the publisher was more aggressive than ever. John Shaw Billings, a senior Luce editor who kept a careful record of Luce’s thoughts and feelings, noted in his diary on December 5, even as the rout from Kunuri was still taking place, “Luce wants the Big War, not now perhaps, but sometime.” Luce was more convinced than ever that his vision of a major confrontation in Asia was right and that Communism could be rolled back—if the administration did not get in the way. At the same time, as their belief in the eventual and inevitable confrontation between the Communists and the West grew more certain, Luce and some of the senior people around him began to worry about the location of their offices, just in case the Communists dropped an atomic bomb. The Time-Life offices were about two miles from Manhattan’s Union Square, considered the city’s atomic epicenter. There was serious talk of moving the headquarters several miles farther away to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and some people even talked about moving the headquarters to Chicago. Nor eventually did MacArthur’s weak showing before the joint Senate committees affect Luce, who wanted to make him Time’s Man of the Year for 1951 but was talked out of it by his editors.

  A NUMBER OF the men who were part of decision-making in Washington remembered the weeks that followed the Chinese entry as the darkest period of their governmental service, a moment of paralysis. They were under constant attack, and the man who should have been helping out and leading the resurgence of their military forces had become their leading critic. Every bit of news, it seemed, was bad. There was a horrible vacuum in leadership and no one in Washington seemed to be able to fill it.

  Particularly upsetting was the fact that these were not the flawed troops the United States had thrown into Korea back when the war began: these were the best the country had, and yet they had been hammered badly; and now the Americans were fighting the most populous nation in the world, whose underarmed forces suddenly seemed invincible. It was a horrendous equation: the war was much bigger, the enemy more powerful, the domestic political support for it greatly diminished, and becoming slimmer by the day. In general, those who worked in that administration are now regarded as among the ablest men of a generation. The phrase “The Wise Men” has been applied to them in the title of an admiring, best-selling book. But all of them, even as they had sensed during October and November that something terrible was about to happen, had been silent, frozen in place, while MacArthur continued to stretch his orders. They and the civilians who had gone to Wake Island had never asked MacArthur the tough questions when it mattered, in no small part because the political tide was moving away from them. They, who had never trusted him, had acted as if he were some kind of prophet, authorized to speak not merely for his own command but for the Chinese commanders as well. Now, as he unraveled in Tokyo, they once again seemed powerless to do anything about him or the command.

  It was not just the Joint Chiefs and
the senior political people like Dean Acheson who failed to restrain MacArthur at that juncture, it was also the most respected public official of the era, George Catlett Marshall, who had just moved over after an enviable tour as secretary of state and an all too brief retirement to become secretary of defense. Of the senior group, he was the most knowledgeable and experienced, an icon of icons, more like a father figure than a peer to most of the men serving Truman. He was the quietest and most modest great figure of an era: he never raised his voice, never gave angry commands, never threatened or bullied people. His strength came from his sense of purpose and duty, which were absolute; his almost unique control of his own ego; and his ability to separate what mattered from what did not. Because of his awesome self-discipline and stoic personal qualities it was easy to underestimate Marshall’s full value. He was often seen as being primarily skilled as a great management man, and what he did not get credit for was his sheer intellectual firepower, something he was quite content to mask. George Kennan might have been a more classic example of a gifted intellectual figure working in a bureaucracy, and Acheson, with his cutting wit and his formidable verbal skills, a more forceful figure in any public debate, but Marshall quietly possessed a rare mind of uncommon intellectual strength, with an exceptional sense of the consequences of deeds. In some ways he was self-taught during that long and difficult career, but he had used every position he ever held, no matter how lowly and disappointing, to understand the forces at play around him. What he had come up with was the rarest of things, and the hardest thing in the world to seek, and that was wisdom. His was the most pragmatic kind of intelligence, never flashy, and he always made clear that a deeply held sense of duty was more important than sheer brilliance; far fewer men talked of Marshall’s brilliance than they did of MacArthur’s, but in a quiet, reserved way, Marshall tended to get the larger forces of history at play in his era right, as MacArthur often did not. His decline in that period was a grievous loss for the Truman team.